While China’s GPU game a still a fair bit behind, however their CPU tech is catching up.

Loongson is a great example. Using their own ISA, their LA664 based chips could match Zen 2 processors on many general purpose tasks and the next gen LA864’s are looking to make another jump. Yes, they are behind but this companies chips from a decade back could barely compete with a Pentium 3. They are hungry and moving fast.

Yeah, I was a fool that I even vaguely thought we would have something sort of resembling a digital utopia. The 90’s were weird.

They really do have a golden opportunity. Most countries are dependent on them for trade, the US military is drifting wildly, China has just demonstrated that they can influence oil markets far greater than anyone else, and China is are the point were if they don’t take it in the next few years that they might not have the chance ever again.

There is a chance that China make a move and nobody comes to defend Taiwan because they know the alternative is worse for themselves.

I think it is more a case of, it showed that there is still a weak link in all of this and it is not technological.

I don’t care about this kind of gossip level junk, but this for once has potential blow backs. Not that I really care about that either.

The other good idea I have seen was from Douglas Rushkof. He would write a chapter of his fiction book. Then he would feed the rough details of this into a generative AI story service and them compare the outputs. If the AI version was similar or better, then we would do a complete re-write. Because you can consider generative AI to be a revision to the mean/average, if your work reads like that, you have to try to be better.

David Graeber might have something to contribute to this subject.

We could call it the Intel Principle. ;)

To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value… that is much more subjective.

Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.

Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.

About the only time I have been like ‘Yeah alright, I get it’ is if you have a sort of writers block. Get a rough draft spat out but then bounce of that, but do not rely on LLM junk for anything more than that.

Five figure!? That’s a bargain. many are going well into six figure territory nowadays.

Ram man Sam should fall into a Dam.

Suppose to do life at work, yes. Outside of there, I don’t give a damn what you think!

To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.

An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)

At least the Macbook Neo comes with a lot more flashy stuff.

It is starting to feel like it. Might not see price decline for a while yet, but the upswing on pricing is nearing breaking point.

I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.

I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!

For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.

But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.

Debian the foundation of the modern world. Or at least we wish it was.

A situations like this makes me use a form of Malapropism one would expect of a Dickensian society to bring about almost Orwellian situation. Makes you wonder when someone will use Chekhov’s Gun before it all gets Bowdlerized. Alas this Machiavellian paragraph is reminiscent of a Lovecraftian creature.

But seriously, that paragraph above reads like the scene in Blackadder when they meet the writer of the Dictionary.